A Praying, Healing & Restoring Community

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We're finishing the book today with James chapter 5, verse 13 through 20. And I think you can pull this up also on the YouVersion. There's notes on the YouVersion of Thrive. You can follow sermon notes on that for Thrive Community Church as well. And I have all of the quotes and stuff I'm using in the sermon today. Let's read the text and then pray. Is any among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. He has committed sins. He will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit. My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. This is how the book ends, and it's great stuff. It's not rocket science. It's not quantum mechanics. It's very practical, down-to-earth, things that you probably already know, and in that sense, I think we really need to pray, because the things that I know and don't do are the hardest things in my life. I know what I should be doing, but I just don't get around to it, and I think the issue is what we're talking about here, the framework of grace. If I have the right framework, then the things that I know start fitting in, and I might start accomplishing, so let's pray. Lord God, we keep praying for the Holy Spirit. We pray, Lord God, you would send your Spirit now to move us, that by your grace you change everything, and that these words of James, very practical and personal and down-to-earth, would become a reality for us as a community here at Thrive, as well as individually. Bless, Lord, all the churches in our area. We thank you for so many of them, from Summit to Gulf Coast Presbyterian to Hope to Zion. Lord, we thank you for so many churches that are unnamed, but we bring them before you. Our campus ministries that we partner with, Lord, sharing the gospel on the campus of FGCU. We thank you for them as well. Bless this day that your Spirit has his way with each of us now. In Jesus' name, amen. Very practical. We've only got three points. I'm going to try to keep it short today. This could have been like four different sermons, and you know how long I preach already. The three points are this. James calls us or invites us to be a praying community, a healing community, and a restoring community. All three. Now, if you just listen to the text and what I just said, you go, oh gosh, now, okay, here it comes. He's going to tell me I should be praying more and I don't, that I should be praying for others and I don't, and I should be really like opening myself up with all my yuck to others and I don't want to. And that's the framework of guilt and the framework of obligation. And if that's our framework, it will not motivate me to do much of anything, right? But as we said, it's not what we see, the reality of these things, but it's through what we see. And through the framework of grace, that's why we have all these frames up here. Last week for that, I guess. But through the framework of grace, we see that this is not an obligation, but an invitation, a privilege. Because what we're really talking about today is the fact that we have the amazing privilege of communing with the living God. And that's what James invites us into today. Grace changes everything. Grace becomes the fuel, the motivator, the reason why we can do any of these things. And whether we do them well, it doesn't really matter. It's not about how well we do this. It's so amazing to me how many times in the 29 years as a pastor that I come to a situation where somebody feels a need for prayer or to a meal or anything. And they always turn to the pastor as if we've... It's like, my prayers don't get through any more than yours. I might practice it more, but it's just like anybody who practices something. You just do it long enough, you can do it. It's not the depth of words. You don't have to have theological language in it. It's just pouring yourself out to God, opening up to Him and praying for His will to be done. And if you don't know how to pray, it's okay. Read a prayer, the Psalms. We'll get into that later. I mean, almost all the Psalms are prayers or the Lord's Prayer. And just, I mean, it's so...